David Attenborough's Zoo Quest in Colour

Tonight, we've got rather a different programme for you.

In 1954, David Attenborough

embarked on a ground-breaking television series.

Watched by millions of viewers across Britain,

it became the most popular wildlife programme of its time.

And it launched David Attenborough as a wildlife presenter.

If you don't want this, I'm warning you, I'm giving it to Robert.

Zoo Quest filmed a number of animal collecting expeditions,

organised by the London Zoo.

And brought to the screen

places and animals that had never been seen before.

It was the first natural history series on film

that the BBC had shot.

Zoo Quest was first broadcast in the 1950s.

Over a decade before colour television came to the UK.

So the entire series was shown in black and white.

A few months ago, a remarkable discovery was made

in the vaults of the BBC Natural History Unit.

An archivist was checking through

some of the film cans from Zoo Quest.

She took a closer look at these reels of film

and realised that she had unearthed a piece of television history.

They were some of the original films shot on location,

over six hours' worth.

Not only were they in extremely good condition,

but they were actually in colour.

They show animals filmed for the first time,

as well as being a unique cultural record of a bygone era.

I was astonished to hear that they had all this colour negative stock.

I had never seen it. Nobody had ever seen it, I think.

It had never been printed in colour.

And it had an extraordinary quality.

Quite unlike modern colour film

and certainly unlike modern colour television.

And now the best of this original colour footage

can be seen for the first time.

And with it the story of how

this pioneering television series was made.

I was astonished when someone said we've got nearly all the film

of the first three expeditions you did in colour.

I said, "It's impossible, we shot in black and white."

I hadn't seen a foot of that film since it went out.

And when it went out it was all in black and white.

And it looked pretty miserable.

Using the latest technology to remaster the original colour film,

it can now be seen in high definition as never before.

I was absolutely staggered at the quality.

At its best, it's as good as any colour you see now.

And the big close-ups of animals, the faces and the eyes.

Quite staggering for the period that it was filmed in. I was astonished.

And there is a good reason as to why colour film was used.

It was all due to David's choice

of using a lightweight hand-held 16mm camera.

I was insistent that we would have to use 16mm film.

Now, that was very much smaller than the 35 mil which the BBC use.

We couldn't take the very big cameras into the bush in Africa.

And the Head of Films at the BBC

thought that 16mm was beneath contempt.

There was a bit of a row, so we had a big meeting and eventually I got

permission to use 16, which was the first time ever for BBC Television.

But the film department had their own back.

They said, "All right. Well, if you use 16,

"you will have to shoot it on colour negative.

"Because that will give you much better definition.

"It won't be as fuzzy as black and white negative would do."

I had to go and find somebody who would shoot this.

And I heard that there was an amateur cameraman,

a young chap who was very good on 16 mil cameras.

So I discovered his name, which was Charles Lagus.

I met this young man called Attenborough

who nobody had ever heard of before.

And we got chatting.

I said, "Look, I'm going to West Africa.

"Would you be at all interested in coming?"

And he said, "Well, I might."

We seemed to hit it off straight away.

We laughed at the same jokes

and so at the end of it I said, "Would you like to come on holiday?"

I said, "Well, am I actually doing the job with you?"

He said, "Well, yes, of course you are!"

David and I were really nobodies.

Somebody who was going off with 16 mil film? They were amateurs!

We were rebels, really.

And rather sneered at, I think,

by the Film department, certainly.

I'd got to know a lovely man called Jack Lester,

who was in charge of the reptile house at London Zoo.

Jack was going to be the star. I was the director.

And so Jack, Charles and I were the team.

What we were going to do was to film sequences in Africa

of Jack Lester collecting things.

He would pounce on a snake, let us say,

and then we would dissolve from that film sequence to the snake

in the studio, with Jack struggling with it and explaining it.

And that was the idea.

The zoo agreed and the BBC agreed,

and Jack and I both agreed. Off we went.

Charles and I set off with Jack and a chap called Alf Woods.

One of the senior keepers from the birdhouse.

And when we landed in Sierra Leone, it was the first time

I'd ever been to the Tropics and I was absolutely knocked out.

I remember very clearly walking across the grass strip

and then I saw something moving. It was a chameleon.

I though, "A chameleon in the hedge here!" And there was a mantis.

I was suddenly struck by the huge proliferation of life

which is characteristic of the Tropics.

That muggy air, that tropical air, not only loaded with moisture

but loaded with smells from the earth and from the forest.

'We set off in our lorry along the dusty red earth roads which

'cut through the thick tropical bush on our way into the interior.'

'But distances in Sierra Leone are not only measured in miles,

'they're also measured in rivers.

'And the slow hand-pulled ferries that cross them.

'But, to us, the time spent on ferries wasn't wasted.

'We hoped to take back to London a representative collection

'of the whole of the animal life of this part of Africa.

'And the ferrymen, being the biggest gossips in the area,

'were just the people to tell us

'if anyone had caught any animals recently.

'And to pass on the extraordinary news

'to all travelling along the road that a party of Englishmen

'were willing to buy animals of all sorts

'and were offering rewards to anyone who could show them the nests

'of some extraordinary bald-headed bird.'

I wanted an objective for our trip.

I said to Jack Lester, I said,

"Couldn't we make it a quest for something?"

He said, "I suppose we could."

I said, "Well, isn't there something

"that nobody has ever seen before alive?"

Jack had a fascination for a bird

called Picathartes gymnocephalus.

And I said, "Jack, you see,

"A Quest For Picathartes Gymnocephalus

"is not a winning title."

It was a very boring-looking bald crow.

"Hasn't it got another name?"

He said, "Oh, yeah." I said, "Great. What's the English name?"

He said, "A bald-headed rock crow."

I said, "Well, even Quest For A Bald-headed Rock Crow

"is not a crowd-pleaser, particularly.

"Not one to track them in." So then we just called it Zoo Quest.

'We came to our first African village,

'where life continues in the same way

'as it's done for hundreds of years.'

'An old man sits patiently weaving his cloth

'in the ancient traditional way.'

'Women sit in the shade of the huts,

'carding and spinning the locally-grown cotton,

'ready for the weaver.'

'Cassava and rice has to be pounded to flour in wooden pestles.

'But here, as everywhere else, there's time for beautification.'

'Outside the village,

'as outside every village large or small in West Africa,

'there was one tree supporting a great chattering colony

'of weaver birds.'

BIRDS CHATTER

Thanks to their convenient location, these weaver birds were in fact the

first wild animals ever to be filmed for a David Attenborough series.

'They're very destructive creatures,

'causing a great deal of damage to crops of grain.

'But although it would be easy enough to cut down the trees

'and destroy the nests,

'the villagers rarely take any action against the birds.

'For they believe that if you drive away the weaver birds,

'you will drive away prosperity from the village.

'And so the birds are left to strip the leaves from their tree,

'tear them into long ribbons and sew and weave them

'into their beautiful, intricate nests.'

'Our first duty on arriving in the village

'was to pay our respects to the chief.

'If he gave us his official approval,

'we could be sure of the help of the best hunters in the district.

'The chief came out of his compound to meet us,

'followed in procession by some of his many wives.'

'Everyone gathered round to see what he wanted.

'And we were the objects of a great deal of curiosity,

'not entirely unmixed with fear as far as the children were concerned.'

'Jack explained that we had come to collect all sorts of animals,

'and as we didn't know the African names,

'we carried pictures of the creatures we particularly wanted.

'This, the emerald starling, the chief recognised,

'though he would insist on turning it upside down.

'But picathartes, right way up or upside down,

'didn't mean anything at all to him.

'"But did we like snakes?" he said?'

Jack was great with snakes.

He would pick up the most poisonous snakes

that local people were terrified of.

'A Gaboon viper, just as deadly as the cobras.

'It was crawling only a few yards away from our hut.

'It looked sluggish, but it can strike like lightning.'

And now its beautiful markings can be seen in their full glory.

They provide perfect camouflage

when amongst the leaf litter of the forest floor.

'Our people had found it

'and, like most of us, they were terrified of it.

'But when Jack heard of it, he was delighted and came running,

'anxious to catch such a handsome snake

'for his reptile house in the zoo.'

A Gaboon viper is a very formidable thing.

Jack in fact catches it either at the back of the neck,

or indeed, rather more dangerously, I think, picking it up by the tail

and making sure he doesn't get anywhere near where it can bite you.

And then dropping it in a box or a sack.

Of course, 60 years ago,

zoos regularly sent out expeditions to collect live animals.

Nobody thought much about conservation or really considered

that animals might be driven to extinction.

Of course, these days, you would never dream of doing that.

'People started bringing boxes and cages to us in great numbers.'

'The contents of this box we wanted very much indeed.

'For sticking her fingers through the slats

'and scratching anyone who came near

'was a very young baby chimpanzee.'

'Within four days, we had so won her confidence that she would run

'to take milk from Jack's lap.

'And from then on, Jane, as we christened her, was

'the tamest and most affectionate animal in the collection.'

And it was so rewarding

because it almost became one of the family with us.

It would put its arms around us and just hug us.

'She spent most of her time climbing about in the trees

'nearest to whichever hut we happened to be staying in.'

In those days, it was quite common

for people to have baby chimpanzees as pets.

Jane was quite young, actually, and I looked after her

and I became very fond of her. She was a sweet creature.

And Jane became a firm favourite with viewers at home.

Again, something you would not possibly be allowed to do these days

and again, quite right.

'Jane the chimpanzee was always curious,

'as to see what was going on.

'And insisted on inspecting

'each new addition to the collection as it arrived.

'Like this little antelope.'

'This young mongoose didn't appreciate her attentions at all

'and give her a sharp nip.'

As we built up a collection,

somebody would have to look after all these newly-captured animals.

'At our base, Alf Woods, who came out from the zoo's birdhouse,

'was looking after our rapidly-growing collection.

'This small section contains our sunbirds.

'They live by sipping nectar from flowers.

'But in captivity they will feed and flourish

'on a mixture of honey and water,

'which they sip from these little jars.'

'When a new one is first brought in,

'it has to be shown that the jars contain something worth eating.

'So Alf always held it in his hand, dipped its beak into the honey

'and he drinks.

'His threadlike tongue flashing in and out at an enormous rate.'

The way things got looked after, it was amazing.

And I don't think we ever lost an animal.

'In this tin, we had two little African bush rats,

'which were even younger.

'They were so small that they couldn't tackle solid foods,

'so we fed them with milk from a pen filler.'

David and Jack, and in the early days Alfie Woods,

knew exactly how to look after everything that we caught

and they were just amazing with them.

'A great difficulty with all these youngsters is to keep them warm.

'And at first we always put little bottles of hot water

'inside their tins overnight.

'This young ground squirrel,

'though very weak when he first arrived,

'did well under this treatment and ate vast quantities of palm nuts.'

'Young birds always had to be fed by hand.'

'This young owl demanded food every three hours.'

But when the team went out to film animals in the wild,

there was a problem.

In West Africa in the forest, it's really very dark.

And I remember Charles going in, the first time he went in,

he said, "We can't film here at all."

I said, "What do you mean, not at all?" There was a bit of a blow.

He said, "There is not enough light.

I said, "Even for black and white negative?"

He said, "No, it's just too dark.

"The only way we can film here to get a decent picture

"is to cut down a tree."

And so that was a bit of a facer, really.

But when I did realise, I thought we'd have to think of something

else, so what we decided to do was we would film birds that were

out in the open, or we would go into clearings in the forest.

Now, there aren't big animals sitting in the clearings,

but there are small animals.

'We were interested in little animals, as well as big ones.

'And one of the commonest insects in Africa is the termite.

'There's more than one sort of individual termite.

'The most common are the small workers.

'But among them are the soldiers, with enormously enlarged heads,

'armed with great jaws

'with which they can give the most painful bite.'

'Naturally, when the nest is disturbed,

'the soldiers are very much on the warpath.

'And so cutting a section of their nest

'can become quite a painful business.'

Close-up photography of things like insects was almost unknown.

Nobody had done this before.

Charles was really very inventive.

He took an ordinary hollow piece of metal and screwed it on the end

of a lens and so increased the magnification, as it were.

And he was very, very ingenious at doing that.

When you get a close-up of a praying Mantis,

they are fascinating in themselves.

It's like magic.

They were very impressive shots.

We noticed that there was a wasp on the veranda.

And before I could make it out, Charles was up there and filming it.

There was a male wasp hanging on the side of the nest, waiting to

grab the female before some other male grabbed her and fertilised her.

'Once more, another male arrives.'

'Things are now getting tense.

'The young female continues her struggles

'and hauls herself to the mouth of the cell.

'And now she's free, he seizes her and flies off.'

It wasn't what I thought we'd come to film, if you see what I mean.

But we made a speciality.

That's what we could do, and so we did it.

But the team still hadn't found the subject of their quest.

The elusive picathartes.

'After an hour of cutting a path through the bush up the hill,

'we at last began to get good views of the surrounding countryside.'

'No-one in the first village we stayed in

'had recognised our picture of picathartes.

'And we decided to move on through the bush towards the interior.'

'At last, we reached the next village.'

Very often when we would come to a village,

it was quite a ceremonial event for the people.

HORN SOUNDS

And they would welcome us, they would play music,

and usually quite sophisticated, complicated music to our ears.

I don't think they'd seen film cameras there before

and they certainly had never heard themselves recorded.

There was no way of linking sound recording to film in those days,

on 16mm at any rate.

And David used to do the sound. Not that he had been in any way trained.

It was quarter-inch tape, reel to reel, battery driven.

David took to it like duck to water.

I'd be very careful in the editing later.

It isn't all that noticeable that we haven't got sync sound.

A portable tape machine was quite a new thing.

No-one had seen it in the parts of Sierra Leone where we were.

So they had no idea what we were doing.

'First to perform for us were the newly initiated girls

'who had just passed through the rites of the Bundu secret society.'

'And here, joining the girls in the dance is the Bundu Devil,

'who presides over the initiation ceremonies in the sacred bush.'

'A change of music.

'These drums we knew were used in the dance of the njai society,

'which we had been told we were not allowed to see.'

'As they sounded, the devil itself came into the dance.

'A very fearsome magical devil

'that has the gift of foretelling the future.'

'But we were able to produce some magic of our own.

'For while the dance had been going on,

'I had been recording the music on my tape recorder.

'This, of course, was the object of a great deal of curiosity.

'I always play the recording back

'and let the singers listen to themselves on a little earphone.

'Blank astonishment was always followed by huge grins of delight.'

We tried to explain what we were doing,

but they couldn't understand it.

What we could do was to turn a switch and then use the microphone,

which was a big thing like that, and use it as a speaker.

And so we recorded something with the women

and then I played it to them through the ear.

And they started off by being sort of astounded

and then suddenly delighted.

They thought it was absolutely thrilling.

SINGING PLAYS

SPEECH INAUDIBLE

'Meanwhile, Jack was talking to other members of the village

'and showing our picture of picathartes to everybody he met.

'This man was the local agricultural instructor living in the village,

'and to our delight, he at last recognised the picture.

'The birds he said were not common,

'but he had seen them in the thicker parts of the bush,

'up in the hills at the back of the village.

'So it was that the next day, under his guidance,

'we started off on the journey up the hill,

'on our way at last to the nests of picathartes.'

The problem with the picathartes nesting site

was that it was in deep jungle and it was very, very dark.

And there was simply not enough light for the colour negative stock

that we were using, so we had to use black and white.

'We took our places behind the hide and now came the most tense moment

'of the expedition, the moment for which we had all waited so long.

'Would we see the adult birds?'

It was a six-part series.

We ended each programme by saying,

"But will we find Picathartes gymnocephalus?

"Tune in next week!"

And I was a bit worried about whether this would actually

make any impression on anybody.

And actually Charles Lagus and I

were in Charles' open two-seater sports car and we were

driving along Oxford Street, which you could do in those days.

And a driver leant out and he said, "Hello, Dave!

"Well, are we or are we not going to catch Pica bloody thartes?"

So I thought,

"Well, maybe the programmes are beginning to catch on."

'Suddenly, we saw one

'a few yards away in the twilight of the bush, preening itself.

'This was enormous excitement.

'Then up it fluttered onto the nest.

'And as it did so, the other parent flew across

'and drove the first one away. This was a great thrill for us.

'For as this happened, we became the first Europeans ever to see

'the white-necked picathartes on its nest.'

It did take several weeks before we actually found it.

In a childish way, to film something that nobody had ever

filmed alive before tickled our fancy.

We thought it was fun.

'And eventually we secured a young fledgling.

'Alf Woods offered it a little frog.

'To our delight and relief,

'it accepted it greedily and asked for more.'

Feeding it alone was a chore.

It ate something like 60 little froglets every three hours.

So not only were we filming,

but we were spending our time catching frogs.

'On that food, it grew and flourished

'and made the long voyage back to England.

'Now it's settled and thriving in the London Zoo.

'The first white-necked Picathartes

'ever to be brought out of Africa alive.'

The first Zoo Quest programme went out with Jack Lester

showing the animals, and I up in the gallery

directing the television cameras, which is what my job was.

But after that first appearance, Jack became very ill

with a tropical disease.

He was taken to hospital just after the first programme.

And so the Head of Television said,

"Attenborough, you thought you were director,

"but somebody's got to do the studio."

Nobody else was there, you do it.

And it turned out that he was absolutely brilliant at it.

In fact, he was much better at it than Jack. He was just a natural.

That is the picture of a very rare bird, the white-necked picathartes.

And he could, particularly in the earlier ones, he would laugh

at himself because he knew he was sort of acting for the camera.

One of those Indians taught me how to make the noise.

At least I think I can do it. He goes...

HE IMITATES BIRD Is that any good, do you think?

Ask him!

And that's how he became the narrator.

And became one of the great natural television broadcasters.

And here he is, the very same one.

The tree anteater or tamandua.

-That right, isn't it?

-Well, tamandu-a, we call it.

-Very well.

All television was live, and if you didn't get it right first time,

it was just tough.

Everybody saw you making a mistake.

And from the last... for the last time, from Dr Matthews, Jack Lester,

Charles Lagus and myself, goodnight.

Zoo Quest was a success.

And I thought, "Right, in that case, strike while the iron's hot,"

and I immediately suggested

that we should go to somewhere in South America.

And the obvious place to go was British Guiana, as it then was,

and is now Guyana.

And Jack had recovered and so we set off on our second trip.

This was in 1955, soon after the first series was broadcast.

There were still areas there where it was pristine, really.

Relatively speaking.

That is the South American jungle as I first saw it.

We were flying over British Guiana.

That forest below us stretched unbroken for several hundred miles

up north to the River Orinoco,

right down south to the Amazon and the Mato Grosso.

In fact, it's one of the largest unexplored,

and as far as I'm concerned, exciting areas in the world.

'There are three of us in that plane.

'Jack Lester from the London Zoo, Charles Lagus the cameraman

'and myself.'

'As we came in, we saw for the first time some of the Akawaio Indians

'with whom we would be living for the next months.

'Though these particular people were partly Europeanised, as they lived

'and worked on the government station.

'Our first job was to unload all our stores from the plane.

'Lenses, cameras, film, recording gear, cooking pots and pans,

'food, hammocks and all the other things

'we needed to make us entirely self-sufficient.

'For when the plane left,

'we should lose our last link with the outside world.

'If we had forgotten to bring something,

'well, from now on we should have to do without it.'

'Our plan was to travel up the Mazaruni River

'and explore its tributaries.

'And for transport the district officer very kindly lent us

'his largest dugout canoe. And we set off up the river.

'A tunnel of sunshine, cutting through the jungle.'

'For us, it was all very exciting

'because at last we were seeing the South American jungle close at hand.

'We couldn't expect to see any animals,

'for the noise of our engine would have driven them far away.

'But we were happy enough simply to sit there and enjoy the ride.'

'Late in the afternoon, we heard a distant thundering noise

'and we knew that we were approaching a waterfall.

'After another hour, we reached it.'

'To go further would mean unloading all the canoes

'and carrying everything above the fall.

'So we decided to camp that night on the banks.

'While the boys unloaded the canoe,

'Jack Lester and I enjoyed ourselves.'

Filming in Guyana had its problems.

For me, humidity and rain was the big challenge on the equipment.

How was I going to store all this stuff without getting wet,

without having mildew and fungus growing on everything?

It was a challenge.

So we had biscuit tins with silica gel, which absorbs moisture.

So every time we shot something, we put it in the biscuit tin

and then when the tin was full we sealed it with camera tape

and there it was with silica gel.

You've only got to get a scratch on a film, something wrong

with the exposures, a hair in the gate and you've wrecked everything.

We could be away for three or four months,

thinking that we'd got a film and the rushes come back ruined.

And this really was a nerve-racking thing to live with.

Despite the tricky conditions, the team soldiered on.

'The first village we entered seemed deserted.'

'Then we noticed two tame parrots on the eaves of one of the huts.

'Whatever else these people were, they were obviously pet-keepers

'and of course nothing could've been better from our point of view.'

'Soon, the women emerged from the huts

'and looked at us silently and impassively.

'But there were no men for, as we later discovered,

'they were all out in the forest on a hunting expedition.

'In their absence, the women were busy with the household chores.

'This young girl is weaving a bead apron, or mo'sa,

'which traditionally is the only clothing that the women wear.'

'Two other girls were busy cutting cassava.'

'Cassava is the plant from whose swollen starchy roots

'the Indians make their bread.

'As a food, though, it seems to me to have serious limitations.

'Because its juice contains a deadly poison.

'Prussic acid, in fact.

'So that before you eat it you must prepare it very carefully

'to get rid of the poison.'

'First, it is peeled.

'And then the peeled roots are grated on a board

'studded with small pieces of sharp stone.'

'But you've still not got rid of the poisonous juice,

'and to extract that, the Indians employ an extendable squeezer

'that is a most cunning piece of basket work.

'As you fill it,

'the weight of the grated cassava makes it becomes short and fat.'

'When it's quite full,

'it's carried and hung on the end of one of the rafters of a hut.'

'A pole is stuck through the loop at the bottom.'

'And then all you have to do is to sit on it.

'Your weight makes the squeezer stretch,

'so that instead of being short and fat, it becomes long and thin.

'And the juice, with its prussic acid, falls out at the bottom.

'Sometimes the Indians collect this juice

'and use it in making poison for their blowpipe darts.'

'When the cassava is squeezed

'and the Indians are satisfied that there's no more poisonous juice

'in it, it is emptied in dry pulpy lumps into a wicker basket.'

'Then it's broken up and sifted into a sort of coarse flour.'

'The actual cooking of the bread was, to me, fascinating

'because it's done in exactly the same way as griddle cakes

'and oatcakes are made in Scotland and Wales.

'It's cooked, in fact, on a circular bakestone heated over a fire.

'But as in Wales and Scotland, so in the upper Mazaruni River,

'housewives have a little bad luck in turning the cakes.'

'When the fat white circle of cassava bread

'is cooked on both sides, it's put out on racks to dry in the sun.'

'Having seen the whole of the cooking process,

'I thought I really ought to see what the bread tasted like.'

'Courtesy made me pretend that I enjoyed it, but I can't say I'd like

'to spend the rest of my life

'living on cassava bread, as the Indians do.'

As the Zoo Quest series continued,

it revealed as much about the local people as the animals.

'The children of the village

'had much better things to do than to cook.'

'Fishing is much more fun.'

'These two lads, Carlton and Codrice,

'became great friends of ours.'

Of course, they knew the jungle absolutely backwards.

They took us into the rainforest and made us feel ashamed

at how little we knew and how much they knew.

'There were two other pets in the village, and rather odd ones.

'Capybara.

'They are not related to pigs as you might think,

'but belong to the family that includes rats and mice.

'The rodent family.

'They are, in fact, the largest rodents in the world.

'And, when fully grown, they can be three feet long.'

'These two were comparatively young ones.

'They had been reared from tiny babies

'by the grandmother of our two friends, Carlton and Codrice.

'They had never quite forgotten their childish habit of suckling

'and were prepared to suck anything that was offered to them,

'including my finger.'

'Nevertheless, they were fully equipped with

'the long front incisor teeth of the rodent family.'

And they ate bushels and bushels of grass.'

They were very much village pets, actually.

And although people ate capybaras, in order that nobody else would kill

these village pets which had been reared since they were very young,

they put red patches of paint on them so that they were identifiable.

'The oddest thing about them

'is that they are really amphibious animals and in the wild

'they spend a great deal of their time swimming in the rivers.

'There are two clues to this habit of theirs.

'The first is that

'their eyes and nostrils are placed very high on the head,

'so that like the crocodile and the hippopotamus, they can lie submerged

'in the river with just their eyes and nostrils out of water.

'And the second is that their feet are webbed.

'We were very anxious to film them swimming.

'And for a long time,

'I tried to persuade them to go down into the river. But they wouldn't.'

And Jack's big thing was these are supposed to be aquatic animals.

"Why don't they ever go in the water?

"I want to see film of them in the water."

So I wanted to show this,

but the wretched things wouldn't go into the river.

'And then early one morning,

'Carlton and Codrice ran down to the river for a swim.'

They just jumped into the river.

Of course these capybara, which were semi-tame, followed them

and jumped in the river too.

And we got lovely film of the boys playing with the capybaras

in the river.

'And we discovered that not only were the two boys

and their grandmother's capybara habitual playmates,

'but that the pets would, in fact,

'never go into the water without the boys.'

'I certainly wouldn't like to have said which of them

'were the better swimmers.'

BOYS GIGGLE

And it wasn't only Carlton and Codrice

who enjoyed swimming in the river.

After their swim, there was another skill the boys wanted to show off.

'And our two friends, Carlton and Codrice, give us a short exhibition

'of blowpipe practice, using a small pineapple as a target.'

Both the little boys loaded these blowpipes...

and you look along the top.

And they went...

And sometimes they missed, but mostly they were pretty accurate.

INAUDIBLE

After spending several weeks in the Mazaruni basin,

the team continued their search throughout Guyana for animals

that had never been filmed before.

'Besides egrets, there were also other birds. Blue herons.'

'And here on the top of a tree a snail-eating hawk,

'living up to its name by actually eating a snail as we watched.'

One of the most interesting things as far as I was concerned

was a bird called a hoatzin,

which lived in the coastal swamps.

It had claws on the front of its wings.

And birds as a whole are thought to have been derived

from four-legged creatures, perhaps a branch of the dinosaur group.

So, in a way, that gave you an insight into what the early birds

with claws on their front legs, their wings,

were like as they climbed around in the trees.

It was the first film of hoatzin ever taken, as far as I know.

The next destination for David and the team was the savanna

of South Guyana, but the journey was not entirely plain sailing.

Some of the transport, when we were lucky,

was a little seaplane driven by a wonderful pilot.

He must have been ex-air force or something like that,

because he was just brilliant.

And we had to take off on a fairly short-ish stretch of river

which finished in very tall jungly trees.

In it we had Jack Lester, me, David

and a mass of equipment.

It looked awfully overloaded to me.

And Colonel Williams said, "Don't worry, lads."

He said, "I've done this before."

And the engines started.

He put absolutely full boost on.

And we roared down this stretch of river. And we got faster and faster.

And suddenly I could see the trees coming closer and closer

and closer and closer. He was going straight...

I was convinced we were going to go straight into them.

When suddenly when they were just very close,

he suddenly put his arm around the controls and leant back like this.

The plane went up into the sky.

While he was doing that, he started fumbling. I said, "Are you OK?"

He said, "Yeah, I need my bifocals."

He changed his glasses.

And we just made it.

After what was certainly an interesting flight,

they finally arrived at their destination.

The wide Savanna in the south-west. The Rupununi.

Here they met up with ranch owner Teddy Melville.

'He took us up to a remote part of his ranch,

'where he said he had heard reports of a large anaconda snake.'

'The savannas were littered with giant termite hills,

'standing like tombstones.'

'Teddy took us down to a thicket in a swamp

'where the snake was supposed to lurk.

'But instead of finding signs of an anaconda, Teddy's sharp eye

'immediately picked out the footprints of a giant anteater.'

The big thing was whether we could get a giant anteater.

So we had a go at it.

In a rather extraordinary way.

Amateur ham-fisted way.

'While we were looking at them,

'there was a rustle on the other side of the thicket. We looked up.'

'And there was the anteater itself galloping across the savannas.

'Without thinking how we were actually going to catch it,

'Jack and I set off wildly in pursuit.'

And I ran after it. What I was going to do, I can't imagine.

But I actually tried to slow it down by catching its tail.

But when it turned round and had a look at me,

I decided that was as far as I was going to take this.

Giant anteaters have these huge powerful forelegs

with enormous great claws on them, which they rip open termite hills.

And the one thing to avoid was the embrace of the giant anteater

because it was lethal.

The local rancher who was helping us lassoed it, poor old thing.

And we captured it. Jack had got it for the zoo.

And it did very well. Lived for quite a long time.

With all the animals collected,

the expedition in South America had come to an end.

But sadly, Jack Lester took a turn for the worse.

Jack suddenly collapsed again.

And he had to be flown home urgently.

And the expedition then came to an end.

It turned out that they didn't know what it was.

I'm very sorry to say that Jack has been very ill.

It started halfway to the expedition and he's still in hospital.

I think he's probably looking in

and we all wish him a very speedy recovery.

When we came back, he was in hospital.

So there was no question of him taking part.

And in fact, he never really recovered.

And he died a few months later.

The Guyana series was another big hit with the British public.

Keen to keep Zoo Quest as a regular event,

it was time for David to choose the next destination.

We'd done Africa, we'd done South America,

and the Far East would be the obvious place.

And I had read about giant lizards which the press had called

dragons, which lived on a very small island in the middle

of the Indonesian archipelago, in a place called Komodo.

Well, having found it on the map, we then had to try and get there.

But nobody in London could give us any idea as to how we could do so.

So Charles and I decided the thing to do would be to fly to Singapore

and then somehow, in some way or another, make our way

slowly southwards and eastwards through these islands to Komodo.

And the first place we decided to go to was the mouth

of the Mahakam River, which goes right into the heart of Borneo.

'Everyone had told us that the river

'was infested with man-eating crocodiles.

'But it wasn't until one morning

'three weeks after our arrival in Borneo

'when I was looking for frogs that were whistling and chirping

'in the swamps fringing the river bank, that I actually saw one.'

'And it was no ordinary one either,

'but the variety with the long thin nose. The gavial.'

The only problem with it was it was tiny. I mean, it was a baby.

So I had the idea that we would make a kind of joke of it.

And that we would film it all in close-up

and then I'd film myself taking off my shirt,

and we hoped the audience would say,

"He's not going to tackle that huge thing, is he?!"

And only when I jumped on it

would the people realise that it was just a tiny thing.

'As you can see, no-one could class this little baby as a man-eater,

'even though he had got quite a bite.'

We shot it that way and edited it that way.

But as far as I could see, nobody ever saw the joke.

Happily, we had met a very nice English-speaking Dutchman

called Daan Joubert who acted as an interpreter for us.

'The village itself, like all Dayak villages,

'consisted only of a single long house,

'which stretched for several hundred yards along the river bank.

'The people who watched us from the galleries of the house

'seemed to be very different

'from those we had met lower down the river.

'The head man was on his way into the forest to hunt.

'He showed us his stout blowpipe tipped with a spearhead,

'which he said was very useful for stabbing.'

'And his hat, which was very light and woven from palm leaves.

'We both bought and wore ones like it later on and found them

'to be ideal headwear for the Tropics. Cool and shady.'

'He never carried a gun, he told us,

'but relied on his parang - a crude and heavy Dayak bush knife.'

'He said that we would be very welcome to stay in the village

'for as long as we wished.'

The long house never went to sleep.

There was always somebody trundling about.

So all the time you were going up and down like this.

And down on the ground there were pigs and there were chickens

and they were moving around all night.

And on top of that there were some people chanting.

And I don't think I slept at all the first night.

In the morning, I said, "What was all the chanting about?"

And they said, "They were chanting

"because some important people have recently died.

"It's a funeral chant." I said, "Really? Where are the bodies?"

He said, "Didn't you notice them? They were just alongside you there."

"Oh!" I said, "I didn't realise."

But, no, it was a communal life all right.

And they were lovely people.

And one of them found a little baby bear. A cub.

'The little cub was obviously very young.

'I reckoned about two weeks old. He seemed to be in good condition,

'but he hadn't got any teeth and obviously was still feeding on milk.

'We had got a baby's bottle on board,

'ready for such a case as this, but I wondered whether he was

'yet old enough for us to be able to rear him.

'First, however, he had to be put in a box and covered up,

'so that he kept warm.'

'As soon as the sun went down, it gets quite cold on that river,

'and we didn't want to risk our new pet catching a chill.'

BEAR CALLS OUT

'And then I had to set about the urgent job of making

'a bottle of dilute condensed milk.

'Urgent because the little cub

'was already calling very loudly indeed for his food.'

'The milk seemed to be about the right temperature.'

'And, to my relief, the young cub was soon guzzling away contentedly.'

And here he is.

Twice as large, I should say, but still just as hungry.

And still making this extraordinary little noise which he used to

make out there in Borneo. Oh, Benjamin!

He's grown considerably since we had him.

The cameraman who took all those pictures is here.

And Charles has had him in his flat ever since we came back.

Has he caused any trouble, Charles?

Well, he's fairly destructive.

He likes to eat the lino, newspapers, telephone directories,

almost everything.

Benjamin became known as the Zoo Quest Bear

and I even wrote a little book about him. He was charming.

Very nice.

Well, you're very sweet. What about his teeth?

-Have you had a bite from him?

-Yes, he draws blood regularly now.

When he misses the bottle and gets your finger instead.

In that case, I think when you've finished, Benjamin,

we'll let him go back to your flat and draw a little more blood!

Benjamin had very bent little feet.

And I took it for a walk on a little collar

and a woman appeared from the distance shaking her umbrella at me

and said, "Can't you see your dog's got rickets?"

And then she looked at it and said, "Ooh, it's a bear."

And she ran off in the opposite direction!

After Borneo, David and Charles travelled eastwards across Java,

the next island on their quest.

'On our way through Java, we passed many beautiful buildings.'

'But we saw none more lovely

'than the beautiful Buddhist temple of Borobudur,

'which was built over 1,000 years ago.'

'It rises tier up on tier, shrine upon shrine,

'until at the top there is one final gigantic monument.'

JAVANESE TEMPLE MUSIC PLAYS

'But Java is a country not only of temples, but of volcanoes.

'And our route eastwards

'took us past the still-active crater of Bromo.

'The Jeep couldn't take us up the mountain,

'so in the early dawn one morning,

'we met some hillmen and hired some ponies.

'By midday, the volcano collects a blanket of cloud above it,

'but now, at five o'clock in the morning, it was still quite clear.

'To get to the crater, we had to descend on to a great plain,

'a sea of sand which surrounds the central cone.

'Now, the ground steepened and we had to leave the horses

'and continue on foot.'

'Looking down into the depths of the crater,

'it seemed easy enough to clamber right down to that central vent.

'But our guides would go no further, for they said that the crater was

'full of invisible pockets of poison gas

'and that people who had gone farther down had never returned.

'Even from where we were standing, the air was full of choking,

'sulphurous fumes and the ground beneath our feet shook

'as the clouds of poisonous smoke belched out from the vent.

'It's down there that sacrifices are thrown every year

'to placate the god of the volcano.

'These days, only chickens, cloth and money.

'But in olden times, the sacrifice was a human one.

'We left the volcano with the clouds gathering in a shroud above it

'and continued on our way.

'And the next day, we reached the southern coast of Java

'and the sea, the Indian Ocean.'

Very often, we slept on the beaches, which are wonderful places.

It was very lucky that Charles and I got on so well together.

I certainly look on back with my friendship with him

with great pleasure.

I don't know why we hit it off.

We hit it off from day one.

I don't think we ever had a cross word.

I don't think we ever worried about each other's problems.

I knew he could cope with what he was doing and he relied,

hopefully, on everything I was doing.

The next day, they set off inland.

CICADAS SING

In Jack Lester's absence,

David had to take on the role of catching animals, including snakes.

'It looked enormous, and from its size and markings,

'I was quite sure that it was a python

'and therefore, non-poisonous, which was something of a relief.'

So, I thought, "Oh, this is the moment!" Nothing frightened,

I skipped up the tree and took out my trusty cutlass and I thought,

"I won't grapple with the snake up in the tree,

"I'll cut the branch down."

The branch came down and I nipped down the tree

and then had to face the python.

So I tried to remember what I'd learnt in West Africa.

I picked up a sack and tried to throw it over the animal's head,

very inexpertly, I must say.

It went nowhere near the head! But I was quite nervous, after all.

But eventually, I managed to throw it over the animal's head

and grasp it by the neck.

'It's important to grab his tail as soon as you grab his head,

'otherwise he'll wrap his great coils around you

'and give you a very nasty squeeze.

'And here he is in the studio.

'The python is not a poisonous snake at all,

'it kills its prey by squeezing it.'

Of course, my expertise as an animal handler, a zoo man, as it were,

was exposed rather painfully every now and again on television.

Well, helping me... Helping me control...

..this python is Mr Langwarne

from the reptile house in the London Zoo.

I'm pretending to be very accomplished and expert about snakes

in front of Mr Langwarne,

who was the head keeper of the reptile house.

He's quite a handful now, isn't he?

You could quite imagine how these powerful coils

-could really give you quite a crush.

-Oh, yes.

He was very charitable towards my attempts at trying

to control this wretched snake.

-He's doing...

-Well, it's a very good example

of how he constricts his food.

Shall I just show you, or will you lose your hand?

No, I don't think so. You'll be able to get out eventually.

Well, I think we'll untie you later.

Thank you very much for coming.

JAVANESE TEMPLE MUSIC PLAYS

After leaving Java,

the team continued their journey east onto Bali.

A few minutes of travel was enough to show us

that in coming to the island of Bali,

we had come to a different world.

There were high mud walls round the houses,

which we'd never seen in Java.

The people looked quite different.

And as we travelled along the grassy tracks,

we passed through the terraced rice fields for which Bali is famous.

BOY PLAYS SULING

SULING MUSIC CONTINUES

It was an intoxicating place,

because it was, er...full of beauty.

But above all, we were impressed by the great number of temples.

There were temples everywhere,

and all were decorated with a wealth of intricate carvings.

This one lay in the centre of a small forest.

Many Balinese temples are sacred to a particular animal,

and the courtyard of this one was haunted by a troop of monkeys,

ever-hungry to snatch food from worshippers who came to the temple.

It was a real joy to meet these bold creatures,

even if they did do their best to steal things from my pocket.

MONKEYS CHIRP

When they are grooming one another,

they're not simply looking for fleas,

but are searching one another's skin for tasty little grains of salt.

We had a problem. When we changed film quickly on the camera,

normally you'd have a clapperboard.

We didn't have clapperboards, so we weren't running in sync.

So David invented a clever system - raffle tickets!

He would always have them in his pocket,

and when we changed a reel, he'd fish it out,

and he'd just hold it up in front of the camera

and stick it on the camera film,

and that was our way of pre-editing the film

and knowing what was on what.

The whole business of 60mm film at the time,

we didn't have any code of behaviour or any expertise, really.

We just did it the way we thought was sensible.

It was clockwork-driven

and you had 40 seconds of film before it ran out.

Then you had to stop and wind it up again. And it only took 100ft reels.

That's two minutes 40 in 60mm.

So, this is quite a handicap when you're filming.

Especially when filming complex sequences, like a village festival.

THEY PLAY RHYTHMICALLY

The music of Bali is particularly beautiful,

the gamelan music, and of the most brilliant kind.

The gamelan plays and rehearses every night,

every night in the village.

'These young girls are only eight years old

'and they've been training to perform this beautiful temple dance,

'the Legong, since they were six.

'They wear on their heads crowns of leather and gold leaf,

'decorated with the ivory coloured blossoms of the frangipani tree.'

While Charles filmed it, I recorded the music

and I think Bali's gamelan music was heard for the first time

by millions of people in Britain.

The Balinese are not only great sculptors

and instrumental musicians,

but they are also great actors

and they're continually re-enacting the stories from the Ramayana

and from the Balinese version of some of the Hindu legends.

'Now begins the masked play. A demon descends the temple steps.'

It's a deeply religious thing.

The villagers watch this enactment of the story again and again

and again.

One of the great epics is there's a battle between the evil,

which is represented by a horrifying witch, who has a long tongue

and huge long fingernails and is a terrifying figure.

'Rangda, the dreaded evil witch.'

Who then attacks a very friendly mythical creature called Barong.

'And now comes the superb Barong, the mythical monster which lives

'in the temple and is the guardian

'of the village and of its graveyard.'

And the battle between Rangda and the Barong is one of the great

dramas that is enacted by these rituals which go on every day.

'And now begins the fight.

'The men from the village, in a state of trance,

'rush down from the temple, waving their swords to attack Rangda

'and protect the Barong.

'But Rangda, by her evil power, is able to hold them at bay.'

And then suddenly, the Rangda makes a spell, whoof!

'With a flourish of her magic cloth,

'she forces them to turn their daggers upon themselves.

'The men, almost insensible, try to thrust these sharp

'swords into their chest.'

They really looked that they were going to pierce their abdomens

with them and they pushed and they pushed.

But the Barong is sufficiently powerful,

so it means that the daggers don't pierce their chest.

'The Barong's power is stronger than Rangda's

'and he is able to protect his followers, so that no blood is shed.

'Now, the priest comes from the temple

'and scatters holy water to bring the men out of their trances.

'The men rush back into the temple. The Barong disappears.

'And all that is left are the mangy curs,

'eating the priest's offerings to the gods.

'I can offer no explanation for that extraordinary performance,'

but I was a little worried lest Rangda the witch should decide to

turn their swords on the BBC.

Well, two days after that dance, we had to leave Bali

and continue on the last leg of our trip to Komodo,

the island of the giant lizards, the dragons.

Komodo was on the western end, the farther end,

of this banana-shaped island.

So we went down to the harbour.

There was one single sail 30ft little fishing boat there.

And that was all there was.

So, eventually, we managed to talk to the skipper of this boat

and he said no problem and we said, "Can you take us to Komodo?"

He said, "Oh, yes."

So we agreed and there was Charles and me

and there was Sabran, our guide, who was the interpreter.

And there was the captain and some boys, who were his crew.

We had no choice by then,

so we loaded all our stores onto this miserable little 30-footer.

'We loaded all our equipment into the hold beneath the tiny cabin.

'That was the tape recorder.

'Our kit,

'and the camera.

'We didn't take much food

'because we expected to be able to catch enough fish to last us

'for the few days it was going to take us to get to Komodo.

'Here comes Sabran.

'The sail goes up.

'We haul up the anchor.

'And at last, we're off.

'We headed away from the shore and soon,

'the trade winds were filling our sails.

'The boys took it in turn on the tiller.

'This is Hasan, a cheerful lad who unfortunately was not a particularly

'good steersman, as he had the habit of falling asleep at the tiller.'

The boy would fall asleep, day or night,

and we'd finish up with this awful crunching noise in the night,

to find that we were on a coral island.

So I said, "I think we're on a coral island." He said, "Argh!

"They are no good!" "What are we going to do?"

We eventually poled ourselves off.

'Sabran, always eager to make himself useful,

'had quickly improvised a kitchen in the stern.

'He had found an empty petrol tin, which would serve as a grate,

'and in it, he had lit a wood fire.'

The trip took nearly three weeks. We lived entirely on boiled rice.

The fish that we were going to have was non-existent.

We said, "Where's your fishing tackle?" This was early on.

"Why aren't you fishing?" He said, "I'm no fisherman."

'To the south of us stretched the mountainous coast of Flores.

'Somewhere, 200 miles ahead, lay Komodo.

'The wind was strong and fair and we were making a good four knots

'through the brilliant clear blue sea.'

And I then said to the captain,

"How long will it be before we get to Komodo?"

And the captain said, "Tidak tahu," which means "I don't know".

The only map we had was the airline map

and Komodo was rather smaller than a full stop,

a little dot on the western end.

And he looked at this map and he said, "Where are we?"

An awful thought struck me.

I said, "You have been to Komodo before, haven't you?"

He said, "Belum," and I didn't know what that meant,

so I had to go down to the hold and get out my little Indonesian

dictionary and it said "belum - not yet".

So he had no idea where we were going.

We said to him, "Are you sure you know where you are?"

And he said, "We are there," and he pointed to Borneo,

which was probably about 1,000 miles away from us.

'It was very hot in the blazing sun and Hasan draped his sarong over

'his head to protect him from the heat.

'And we had nothing to do but to lie on deck

'and wonder what lay ahead of us in Komodo.

'Our fresh water was stored in this earthenware jar,

'lashed to the tiny cabin.

'Unfortunately, it got very hot in the sun.'

It could have been soup because it had nothing

but mosquito larvae wriggling in it.

'But nonetheless, it was quite refreshing.'

This just went on and on and on and we were hungry,

sleeping out on deck, mosquitoes.

So it was in the evening and it was blowing quite a gale, actually,

and so I said to the captain, "I think we go this way now."

But the sea rose and it rose and it got darker and it got darker

and it became quite dangerous.

And suddenly, we were in whirlpools.

And the waves were tremendous. What were we going to do?

The water was going round, the ship was going round.

You could see the sort of fangs of coral,

rocks, in the middle of this whirlpool.

So we were poling away and it's pouring with rain.

Quite honestly, neither of us

were sure that we would ever see each other again.

Unfortunately, we weren't to show any of this on television

because of course, we weren't filming.

Charles wasn't filming, Charles was poling away like the rest of us.

It was that dicey.

And the captain was saying things like,

"Setengah mati, setengah mati!"

He's saying, "I'm half dead! Setengah mati!"

And finally, about four o'clock in the morning, just before dawn,

we managed to get out of the whirlpool area

and into calmer waters in a little bay.

'So, at last, we sailed safely into the wide, calm bay of Komodo.

'The island looked most exciting, as we sailed close by its shores.

'Brilliant white beaches of coral sand,

'clumps of bush near the water's edge, and above them,

'gaunt, bare, volcanic hills, covered in sunburnt brown grass,

'with a few palm trees here and there.

'This was the home of the dragon, which we'd come so far to see.

'We were so happy and relieved to have arrived after such a long

'and tricky voyage that to our eyes, the village seemed a real paradise.

'The Petinggi, or headman, was sitting on the steps of his house.

'He welcomed us very kindly and invited us inside.'

And the chief, the Petinggi, gave us a little feast and during

that, he said, "You know, that captain of yours is not a good man.

"He's actually a gun runner.

"He's been smuggling guns to rebels in Sulawesi

"and the navy is after him."

That's why he was the only person in the harbour.

All the rest were out fishing.

With a lucky escape behind them, the team continued on their quest.

This time with the added ingredient of dragon bait.

'We walked, carrying the two goats, with our cameras

'and recording equipment, ready for this final stage in our expedition.'

The Komodo dragons had never been filmed, at least not professionally.

And this was going to be a top draw if we got pictures of one.

The only problem was that there was not a lot of light.

There was quite heavy bush there.

It was too dark, according to Charles, for us

to use our colour stock, so we had to film it in black and white.

'Now, we had to set about building a trap.

'All the materials you need to make it can be

'obtained in the forest itself.'

They attached the trap door to a simple trigger mechanism,

using a rope.

'He put a piece of goat's flesh inside

'and then shrouded that end with palm leaves.'

RUSTLING

'We waited, but not for long. Within half an hour, there was

'a rustle in the bush and there was the dragon.

'This was tremendously exciting for us.

'Our first sight of this magnificent monster,

'the climax of four months of arduous travel.

'He was enormous.

'As he circled us, flicking out his great yellow tongue,

'he looked almost as though he had walked out of some prehistoric age.'

This enormous monster, the size of a really big crocodile, appeared,

sniffed the air and eventually, it went in after this dead goat.

'And down came the door.

'Hastily, we piled boulders on the door,

'so that he couldn't lift it up.

'We had got him.'

But we didn't have the permit to take it away, so we had to content

ourselves with just measuring it and looking at it in close detail.

So, we let this first famous dragon go and away it went into the bush.

We'd had to use black and white negative stock

for this climax of the whole trip.

We thought we really ought to use the colour negative stock too,

if we could dragons out in the open, as indeed we did,

because on the island, there are a lot of them.

It was, I think,

the first colour film taken of a Komodo dragon in the wild.

Like the series before it, Zoo Quest For A Dragon was another big hit.

The Zoo Quest expeditions did a lot for me.

I never had to look for work again.

And David became a very famous person

and it's Zoo Quest who made him that.

And Charles and David have remained lifelong friends.

They were good days and I wouldn't change them.

I think when you're 28, you do things rather differently from

when you're 88, and you do silly things, which we undoubtedly did.

Looking back,

I don't think you would let two kids in their 20s just go off like that

and nobody asked us anything about health and safety or anything else.

I mean, we just disappeared and they said, "When will you be back?"

"Ooh, just before Christmas, I think." "Righto, goodbye."

Happy days.

That was the end of our Zoo Quest. Goodnight.